Switch to a different Office 365 business plan or subscription

If your business needs change, or if there are Office 365 features you want to take advantage of that are not available in your current plan, you can switch from your current plan to another plan. See a list of Office 365 plans you can switch to.

Prepare to Switch Office 365 plans

To improve your chances of success when switching Office 365 plans, read this section carefully before you attempt to switch plans.

What is the Switch plans wizard?

The Switch plans wizard is built into the Office 365 admin center of all Office 365 business and enterprise subscriptions. The Switch plans wizard does the following:

Leads you through the process of buying a plan that you can switch to from your current plan.

Note Only plans that can be switched to from your current subscription are shown in the wizard.

Moves users from the old subscription to the new one.

Assigns licenses to your users for the new plan.

Cancels your old plan.

Verify that you can switch to the plan you want

Before attempting to switch plans, you might want to first make sure that the Switch plans wizard supports switching from the plan you currently have to the one that you want. The Business plans you can switch to in Office 365 article lists the plans that you can switch between using the Switch plans wizard.
The Switch plans wizard will only show you the plans that you can switch to based on your current plan.

The Switch plans wizard does not support the following scenarios:

Switching to a less expensive plan is not supported by the Switch plans wizard because less expensive plans tend to have fewer services. If you need to switch to a less expensive plan, contact technical support.

Switching from Home subscriptions, such as Office 365 Home, Office 365 Personal, and Office 365 University to an Office 365 for business plan is not supported

Plan for administrative downtime

Users won't experience any interruption of service while the plans are being switched. They will continue to have full access to the subscription that you are switching from until the Switch plans wizard has completed, at which time they will have access to the new plan.

Admins won’t be able to use the Office 365 admin center while the plan is being switched. Depending on the number of users you have, this can take from minutes to hours. So plan to switch plans during a time when you don’t need to make updates using the Office 365 admin center.

Credit checks when switching Office 365 plans

If a credit check needs to be done, switching plans can take up to two weeks. A credit check might be required if you have chosen to pay by invoice or your purchase has reached a certain cost level. If this happens, admins will not have access to the Office 365 admin center until the credit check is complete. However, users will have full access to the plan that you are switching from.

Switch Office 365 plans using the Switch plans wizard

This section shows you how to use the Switch plans wizard to switch plans.

Switching to a less expensive plan is not supported by the Switch plans wizard because less expensive plans tend to have fewer services. If you need to switch to a less expensive plan, contact technical support.

Tip Switching from Home subscriptions, such as Office 365 Home, Office 365 Personal, and Office 365 University to an Office 365 for business plan is not supported.

For Office 365 Small Business Premium subscriptions, click the View and edit subscriptions… link under billing.

For all other business and enterprise subscriptions, select Billing > Subscriptions.

On the Subscriptions page, select the plan you want to switch from, and then, under Actions, click Switch plans.

Note If you don’t see the Switch plans link, your plan can't be switched using the Switch plans wizard. Instead, you’ll see No switch plans.
There are many factors that can prevent you from switching plans. For example, plans that are prepaid using a product key cannot be switched. To find out why you can’t switch plans using the wizard, hover the mouse over the info bubble or click the learn more link.

On the Choose a new plan page, select the plan that you want to switch to and then, do the following:

If the legal agreement page appears, complete the items on the page and then click Next.

On the payment page, do the following:

Select the payment frequency you want.

Select the payment type.

Note Selecting the Invoice payment option can delay the switching plans process by up to two weeks if a credit check is required.

If using a new credit card, fill in the Payment Information section.

When you're all done, at the bottom of the page, click Place order.

On the order completed page, you can click Status to show the progress of your order.

When the switching plans: status page appears, the switch plans process is underway and you’ll see this page until your plan has been switched. You can close this page and come back to it later without interrupting the switch plans process.

Notes Switching plans typically takes less than ten minutes if there are no errors or issues. The license reassignment portion of the process should take less than a minute. Check marks appear next to each of the four phases as they are completed.

When the wizard completes, click OK at the bottom of the Switch plans: status page return to the main page.

Note The main page may initially appear blank except for the Menu button after switching plans are switched. You can click on the Menu button and then click the Admin icon to return to the Office 365 admin center.

The first time you return to the Office 365 admin center after switching plans, you might see a message like this one.

Install a different version of Office on a PC after you switch Office 365 plans

If you installed Office on a PC as part of your Office 365 subscription, and you switch to a different Office 365 plan, you’ll have to install a different version of Office if you move among the following versions of Office 365:

Office 365 Small Business Premium

Office 365 Business

Office 365 ProPlus

After you switch plans and restart Office, Office lets you know that you need to install a different version of Office by displaying the following message:

To fix this, you install a different version of Office first, and then you uninstall your current version. This method is faster than uninstalling Office and then re-installing Office, although that method works, too.